Email marketing consistently produces the best ROI for marketing spend, with Campaign Monitor reporting that businesses get $38 for every $1 spent

The key to making email marketing work for you is leveraging the channel to send messages that encourage revenue-driving behaviours. When you’re starting out, you can reply in person to customers to thank them, to request reviews, or to send discounts.

However, as your business grows, you want to automate those conversations, via email automation workflows. Email workflows are a series of emails that are triggered based on a subscriber’s data or behaviours. These emails are sent out automatically when someone triggers the campaign.

A few examples of these might be:

• A series of emails sent to someone who downloads an ebook from your website, designed to introduce your products, provide positive customer
• Reviews or incentives to purchase
• Reminder emails sent to a potential customer who abandoned their shopping cart, potentially offering a small discount to complete their purchase
• A thank you email sent to a new customer, followed a week later by a request for a review on a social media site

A look at the numbers

Because most people aren’t ready to buy immediately, using automated
email workflows to nurture them is a great way to build the trust necessary for them to take the purchasing leap.

Tools

Easy-to-use tools like Mailchimp that integrate with most ecommerce platforms including Shopify, Wix and WooCommerce,, provided automation services to customers. Depending on your plan, you can build in more complex triggers and functionality.

Platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, Wishpond and lots moree built their business on marketing automation, and generally offer a broader set of capabilities.

Get building

When creating your email automation workflow, you need to sketch the journey that your customer will take, and that starts by defining the trigger that initiates the campaign, and then further triggers such as:

• Time frame
• The customer clicking on a link
• A customer opting in for marketing email

The cost of acquiring customers through email marketing is minimal, meaning your cost per acquisition is low and return on investment is high. Every ecommerce business should have an email workflow nurturing leads. If you need more guidance on the matter, we’ve put together a comprehensive ebook with email templates, free for you to download. Just click here. .<\/p>